It’s going to be a busy month! Open Data Camp 3 is just a week away, and then ThingsCamp two weeks after that. I’ve had several small projects on the go in the hope I’ll have at least one working for show-and-tell … progress has been, um, patchy; but I do have this little circuit operational and churning out data to a text file. I’d been waiting to write this post until I had it also talking to ThingSpeak but, yeah, like I said, patchy progress.

Anyway, this is a collection of bits from the CamJam Edukit 2 (Sensors) plus a DHT11 combined humidity and temperature sensor that I picked up on spec when they were on sale. It’s handy because, aside from saving space on the board, it comes with a ready made Adafruit library for talking to it and getting the data out in different ways. The idea of this one was to use all the bits to make a room monitor prototype circuit for our home heat/light system; it checks temperature, light level and humidity, and also checks for motion at regular intervals. Once it’s hooked up we would be able to switch on lights at a certain time of day, warm up a room, trigger the dehumidifier (we have some damp corners!) and make certain conditions dependent on whether or not people are actually using the room. Here’s Lego Pi Mechasaurus putting in sterling service holding up the PIR, which tends to flop over upside down if left to its own devices:

Lending a hand …

I’m also making good use of the Pi Zero prototyping board I bought last month, making this a convenient portable project for bringing to the events and either showing off, or asking for help, depending …